Currently works only with some landline carriers, and not with cell phones. Doesn't intercept most calls until after one ring.

Bottom Line

If you're fed up with robocalls, Nomorobo can help eliminate the problem, intercepting the calls and banishing one of life's small annoyances.

Nomorobo is the first online service I've ever reviewed—the first product of any kind, for that matter—that took no time to test. More to the point, it can save you time too, all but eliminating robocalls and the annoyances that come with them. (Thanks for calling, Rachel, but I don't want your important information about my credit card.) Best of all, Nomorobo is a free service. The company behind it—Telephone Science—makes its money from providing its database of robocalling numbers to carriers like Ooma Premier and Sonic, which use it as part their own robocall-blocking service.

As anyone who's put their phone number on the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) National Do Not Call Registry knows, being on the list does very little to eliminate unwanted calls. Legitimate companies may follow the rules, but scam artists couldn't care less about them. They regularly spoof Caller IDs so you can't tell where the call originates. Ask them to take you off their call list, and they'll typically hang up on you, leaving you wishing that you hadn't been so polite. And they won't take you off the list either.

A Little HistoryThe story of Nomorobo starts with the FTC recognizing the robocall problem, making an informed guess about how to encourage the right people to solve it, and then carrying through to a conclusion. In 2012, it issued its Robocall Challenge to "create solutions that will block illegal robocalls," with $50,000 in prize money at stake. The three winners were announced in 2013, with Nomorobo being the only one I'm aware of that has gone on to establish a service you can actually use.

The good news is that Nomorobo is free, easy to sign up with, and works as promised. I used to get at least one or two robocalls per day. The only sign of them now is that the phone rings once. If I'm curious, I can go to my Verizon FiOS account online, see the calling number, and search for it in a browser. So far, every blocked call has been from a known robocaller, with the number also showing up in my online searches on assorted sites that track annoying calls.

The bad news is that you may not be able to take advantage of Nomorobo. Ideally, it should be directly integrated into the carrier's internal call processing, which is what Ooma Premier and Sonic do. And in principle, it should be able to work with any carrier. All it requires is that the carrier support simultaneous ring, so incoming calls can ring both your line and Nomorobo's line at the same time. In practice, unfortunately, that feature is currently available only on VoIP carriers, and not even all of those.

The list of carriers that work with Nomorobo has some significant players on it, including Verizon FiOS, Comcast Xfinity, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T U-verse. (You can find the full list on the Nomorobo signup page.) Missing, however, are all wireless carriers and all analog carriers. So although it works with Verizon FiOS, it won't work with Verizon Wireless or standard Verizon—a plain old telephone service (POTS) line to those who follow such things.

Not so incidentally, the FCC has recently published a ruling (FCC 15-72, adopted in June 2015) clearly stating that carriers can offer robocall-blocking technologies for consumers to use. That could very well increase the number of carriers that work with Nomorobo fairly quickly.

In the meantime, if you try signing up with Nomorobo and you enter the name of a carrier that doesn't work with it, you'll be sent to a page with the carrier's Customer Service number and a suggestion to call it. As the page points out, the more people who call, the more likely the carrier is to do something about it. The page also promises to send you an email if and when the carrier adds Nomorobo support.

Getting ListedIf your carrier works with Nomorobo, setup is easy. The first step is to go to the signup page and enter your carrier and email address. You'll be directed to a page that confirms the support and tells you to check your email for a link to complete the setup process. The link takes you to a webpage where you can create an account, enter your phone number, and then see step-by-step, carrier-specific instructions for setting up your account with the carrier to take advantage of simultaneous ring with the supplied Nomorobo number.

The last step is to let Nomorobo confirm that you've set everything up right by calling your number. Wait for the ring, pick up when the website tells you to, and you'll hear a message that Nomorobo has been enabled properly.

That's basically it. From that point on, you can measure how well the service works by how rarely you get robocalls. By default, the service will even catch political robocalls, which are legal. If you're enough of a political junkie to want those calls, you can log in to your Nomorobo account, go to the Your Phones page, and edit the settings to disable political robocall blocking. You can also add Nomorobo filtering to as many additional lines as you need.

The Edit page for each phone number also has a checkbox option to Disable Advanced Robocall Detection (which you may need to check to receive Skype calls, depending on the settings the Skype caller is using). If you like, you can easily disable Nomorobo for any registered line or delete the line from the protected list with a single click.

Nomorobo in ActionIt's helpful to know a little about how Nomorobo works, if only to give you some confidence that it won't block legitimate robocalls, like your doctor's office calling with an appointment reminder.

Because spam callers typically change their originating numbers—or at least the Caller ID they're spoofing—on a regular basis, it's not enough to have a list of all the robocalling numbers as they exist at any given moment. According to Telephone Science, Nomorobo monitors about 200,000 numbers that have been identified by various carriers as getting so many robocalls that they can't be assigned to actual users anymore. Nomorobo's algorithm looks for calling patterns that are typical for robocalls and then automatically adds the calling numbers to its list when it identifies one.

If the algorithm incorrectly blocks a legitimate robocall, you can report the mistake on the Nomorobo website. However, the company says that of all blocked calls, fewer than one in a thousand is blocked incorrectly. If a call slips through that should have been blocked, you can also report that on the website.

Another important feature is that if you're unlucky enough to have a number that some robocaller chose as its spoofed Caller ID for a week, you can still make calls to a number that's set up with Nomorobo. When Nomorobo intercepts a call, it gives you the opportunity to enter a response on the phone keypad to a randomly generated audio question so you can prove you're a real person—much like the CAPTCHA responses you have to enter on many websites. Enter the right answer, and Nomorobo will let the call go through.

The key issue, of course, is how well Nomorobo actually works. In the two weeks I've had it watching one of my phone lines, I haven't picked up a single robocall on that line. According to Telephone Science, it actually blocked 13 out of 14 illegal robocalls over that time, let one through from a number that the automated detection algorithm added to its blacklist 20 minutes later, and let four legal robocalls through, including, for example, one from FedEx.

In truth, I would happily have Nomorobo block some legal robocalls as well. According to the company, it will soon add the ability to let you create both blacklists and whitelists, with no limit to how many numbers you can add to either list.

In case you're concerned about Nomorobo collecting a list of your incoming phone calls, Telephone Science says that although it hasn't settled on a policy for data retention or destruction, it also says it doesn't sell or share this data with anyone, and it has a policy that it never will unless required by law.

ConclusionUnfortunately, Nomorobo won't do you any good if your carrier doesn't offer a simultaneous-ring feature or otherwise support it. If it does, however, and you're sick of getting robocalls, there's no good reason not to register your phone line or lines right now.

I'd like Nomorobo even better if the site offered an option to let me to see a list of blocked calls easily, both so that I could see how many it blocked and if it blocked something it shouldn't have without having to comb through all my incoming calls on the Verizon website. However, Telephone Science says this feature will be added at the same time as the blacklists and whitelists, so this should only be a short-term inconvenience. Even without these upcoming features, Nomorobo is an excellent service and worthy of our Editors' Choice award.

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About the Author

M. David Stone is an award-winning freelance writer and computer industry consultant. Although a confirmed generalist, with writing credits on subjects as varied as ape language experiments, politics, quantum physics, and an overview of a top company in the gaming industry. David is also an expert in imaging technologies (including printers, moni... See Full Bio

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